Archive for October 24th, 2009
More Olympics Disaster Fallout for Chicago: Now Mayor Daley wants to sell our water utilities to raise money
For those of you who don’t know, Mayor Daley in Chicago recently sold the city’s parking meter collection to a private company for $1 billion. Like Oprah being handed a hefty bag filled with Baby Ruths, Daley gorged through that money in record time, and the City is broke again.
More than $900 million was recently buried, like a pharaoh’s tomb, into the absurd Block 37 Project (that we keep talking about): in a solid gold and jewel encrusted nutshell, Daley conjured an impossible scheme to dig futuristic high speed rail tunnels under Chicago that would travel from downtown (at Block 37 on State Street, right across from Marshall Fields) straight to both O’Hare and Midway Airports. The digging would require leasing the giant, futuristic, Journey to the Center of the Earth “Chunnel Diggers” that burrowed beneathe the English Channel in the 90s.
Chicago is built on a swamp.
On top of that, there are generations of abandoned tunnels, the remnants of the original city that was destroyed by the Great Fire, and all those loyal Democrat voters who turn out in hordes for every election but then disappear to their tombs somewhere under ground to wait for their next chance to vote for either Daley or Dr. Utopia.
We cannot dig futuristic tunnels to the airports for rocket trains.
As much as every five year old boy in the Western world would love to dream about doing that, right after mounting lasers on sharks and genetically engineering dinosaurs.
Now that the Olympics fiasco is being investigated — the City spent more than $70 million on that, at a time when the transit authority is pleading insolvency AGAIN – it’s time to look at how much money was dumped into Block 37.
Daley went ahead and built the train station support structure deep below a hideous mixed use retail complex on the site…a building that’s falling apart and can’t attract tenants. Word is it will have to undergo millions in repairs.
Millions on top of the near billion that was dumped into this ego project…one that was supposed to guarantee Chicago the Olympics (in the same way the current First Lady assured everyone she would not come back from Copenhagen empty handed, which technically means she should be Queen Margrethe’s “proud of Denmark for the first time in her adult life” problem now).
And now without all that Olympics money heading our way, Daley’s looking to sell the utilities to the highest bidder…starting with our water supply.
If the parking meters were a fiasco after the private company QUADRUPLED the rates, just imagine what the water privatization will be like: it might be cheaper in the end to bathe in champagne (just imagine how Mrs. Utopia would love THAT: “I am proud of my bathtub for the first time in my adult life because it costs so much money to fill up and I don’t have to pay for ANY of it ever again!”).
In Cleveland, Dennis Kucinich was Mayor when the mob tried to force him to sell Muni Light, the city’s power company, to, well, THE MOB. Kucinich resisted, so the Mob forced the banks to call in all of Cleveland’s loans, on the same day, and the city was the first American municipality to fall into bankruptcy since the Great Depression. What’s worse, it took more than 30 years for Cleveland to officially admit Kucinich was right not to sell of the utility. Jane Campbell, Mayor of Cleveland in the early 2000s, FINALLY placed a picture of Kucinich in Cleveland’s City Hall in the Hall of Mayors (before that, they just skipped his term in office, as if it never happened. That’s Cleveland class, right there).
Daley must know this is his last term. It was widely believed that if Chicago won the Olympics, he would have been King-Mayor for the rest of his life. So much money would have been funneled to his machine that he would have been unstoppable in all he dreamed of, and all his relatives would have become billionaires.
But, without the engine of corruption that would have been Chicago 2016, Daley is vulnerable for the first time EVER.
He will be challenged in 2011…and we hope against hope Republicans put up an actual candidate to run against him, instead of a circus clown or an old Marshall Fields mannequin or something.
If you aren’t following Chicago politics yet, you must start now. This water sale business could lead to riots in the streets. People are already so mad about the parking meters, and that only affects people who drive in the city. The water will affect EVERYONE.
Home owners will suffer…landlords will pass the increases onto renters…people are barely making their mortgages and rents as it is. Homelessness and anarchy could result if the water rates are even doubled, let alone quadrupled by a private company like with the meters.
It’s a recipe for disaster in a city on the lake with water water everywhere but soon not a drop to drink.
What is the current First Lady going as for Halloween? Herself.
Why does she keep wearing this hideous dress?
We were stunned when we stumbled upon this today, but EW.com had a blurb about the current First Lady appearing on Jay Leno’s nightly TV yawnfest, which seems more and more designed as a Trojan Horse to take down NBC (nice revenge, Jay, for being booted from The Tonight Show…because you could never have believed your show would be an actual success).
Do you remember the dress Mrs. Utopia wore during the general election that was made from the upholstery fabric of an old cat urine soaked couch found in the sun room at a nursing home in Peoria, Illinois? Sure you do. It’s the dress above, which is honestly the ugliest thing we have ever seen that wasn’t sketched by H.P. Lovecraft or coughed up by Oprah.
Hideous.
Imagine our surprise to see Mrs. Utopia wore what seems to be a favorite dress of hers, yet again, on Leno this past week:
Halloween comes a week early for the White House
That’s the same hideous dress…with that same bat-like bow. We can only assume this is a Halloween costume.
Definitely the same dress
We definitely don’t fault Mrs. Utopia for wearing clothes again and again. Everyone does that. Duh. That’s why they are “clothes” and not “faberge eggs” (which Mrs. Utopia, of course, would think are to be looked at once and then thrown away, all in the name of stimulus spending). We especially like wearing favorite pieces of clothing that flatter us especially well and really look good on us. Those are dubbed “magic shirts” or “wonder pants”.
The dress Mrs. Utopia loves so much is ugly no matter how anyone tries to parse it.
It’s made from upholstery fabric and has a bow on it that looks like a bat.
If we were dressing up a drag queen to go out on Halloween as our current First Lady, this is the dress we would put him in. And there is a VERY good chance this dress is actually designed for a man to begin with, since the current First Lady so enjoys the work of drag designer Jason Wu (whose other clients include RuPaul Charles and Amana LePore, self-billed as America’s favorite transsexual).
What’s really strange is that it appears someone actually bedazzled the bow since Mrs. Utopia last wore this monstrosity. In the picture from the campaign, there are no sparkles on the bow…and in the Leno shots, she’s definitely bedazzled.
Someone thought, “Hmmm…this dress is ugly and looks like it’s made from upholstery fabric found at a yard sale. The bow on it is ugly too. We need to do something about that.”
Leaping into the room lands Rahm Emanuel with, “Oooooh, use one of my bows. They’ve got SPARKLES on them. THAT will make everything better. Gotta run, you bitches, Mary’s late for her private screening of FAME, since I went to Juliard, you know, and I’ve got a certain secret service agent waiting for me with a big tub of popcorn in his lap, if you know what I mean. TOODLES!”.
The bow is even uglier with Emanuel’s sparkles.
This has to be a Halloween costume a week early.
That, or the dress is magical to Mrs. Utopia for some reason…like a good luck charm or pact with Satan or something.
Saturday Open Thread: October 24th, 2009
What’s on your mind this Saturday?
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Here’s something you won’t find reported ANYWHERE by the MSM. We only heard about it because, somehow, we got onto a Log Cabin Republicans email list.
Do you remember a few weeks ago Dr. Utopia went to a Human Rights Campaign event with Joe Solomonese (president of that group), where Solomonese was so drunk on Kool-Aid he completely embarrassed himself, standing there next to that fraud Utopia, claiming this administration actually gave a powdered-donuts chance in Oprah’s reach about LGBTQ issues? It was a total and complete FARCE. Dr. Utopia stood there, speechified, and all the assembled fools stood up and clapped, then cheered, then clap-cheered, like Nancy Pelosi’s whack-a-mole impression during the State of the Union (minus, mercifully, the puce or chartreuse Bizzaro World fashions).
The only saving grace for that event was that someone was smart enough to invite the cast of Glee, so they all got to dress up and look extra spiffy adorable in fancy duds for the night. Love. Those. Kids.
If any of you believe for an instant that Dr. Utopia intends to do anything for the LGBTQ community we remind you of June 29th, 2008 when he refused to march in the Chicago Pride Parade — just as he refused to march in ANY Pride parades every year for all 20 years he’s been in public life. Instead of marching in Pride, he got his hair cut on the Southside and then played a sweaty game of basketball at the elitist East Bank Club in the Loop, before enjoying a long sauna and steam and who knows what in the locker room. Just like the old days at Man’s Country in the 90s.
A rub-a-dub-dub. Lots of men in a tub.
It’s not that Dr. Utopia doesn’t like parades. He loves them, in fact. Marched in the Bud Billiken parade in the black community just a month after Pride. Marched in St. Patrick’s Day parades. When his followers start holding parades for himself, parades his fashion icon wife will be proud of for the first time in her adult life, nothing on Earth will keep him from marching all day long for that.
But, the Pride Parade, not so much on the radar.
LGBTQ rights…not so much with the importance.
Human Rights Campaign…a collection of idiots who buy anything a huckster schills to them, while giving millions of dollars in donations to the Utopia campaign.
Well, here’s word from the Log Cabins that while Dr. Utopia has been lying to the LGTBQ community at events like that Human Rights Campaign dinner, his Attorney General, notorious race-baiter Eric Holder, has been ordering the Justice Department to aggressively dismiss lawuits Log Cabins have filed against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT).
Yup, Dr. Utopia is saying one thing to his gay audience — that he wants to end DADT — while his minions do the exact opposite. The operative case is Log Cabin Republicans vs. The United States of America, which is currently the only active legal challenge to DADT to make it passed the district level. One of the complainants is an Army Human Intelligence Collector who speaks multiple foreign languages, including Arabic, and was booted from the Army after 9/11 because he likes guys. With Islam trying to destroy the West and kill Americans, declaring war on us, the United States is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars training specialists in intelligence gathering and Arabic only to boot them once some rival outs them and gets them tossed out of the service.
That’s just poor business and money management at its core.
And it’s also ridiculous because all of us here have dated at least one service man each…and we can assure you none of them ever turned up on anyone’s Gaydar. We live in Chicago near the Great Lakes Naval Base and meet sailors out just about every night in Boystown. For every gay man or woman (and it’s actually lesbians who are tossed out the most) who gets booted under DADT, there are probably hundreds of other LGBs who serve their full tours of duty…so long as they don’t run against some nemesis who outs them for their own reasons.
Which is what seems to be happening. Is someone in your unit making you look bad because they work harder than you and do a better job than your lazy sorry ass? Want them gone so you can be the cock of the walk? Tell Sarge how much he loves the Santa hat scene in Jarhead.
Which is awesome.
BAM!
He’s toast. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
The Utopia Administration is doing everything it can to stop the Log Cabin case from being heard in California on November 16th. There seems to be no legitimate reason for Eric Holder to be doing this — especially not in light of Dr. Utopia’s lip service to the Human Rights Campaign (and we could so totally do another Man’s Country joke here, in relation to lip service, but you get the idea). The Justice Department has a “duty to defend” in relation to all suits brought against the US, but what Holder is doing far exceeds that.
It’s unprecedented, actually.
Delay, delay, delay.
Almost as if Dr. Utopia just wants to keep stalling and using DADT and DOMA as carrots to rev up the LGBTQ community whenever he wants, getting their hopes up, and manipulating these gullible fools at will…since few in our community have sense enough to stand up and demand actual action.
Well, the Log Cabins are doing just that. We might not agree with them on everything, but we sure back them this time.
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Pursuant to the above, we also just saw that 55% of Americans now believe gays should openly serve in the military.
We aren’t aware of that ever breaking the 50% majority mark before. It might have, but this is the first time we noticed it.
Republicans should take heed here.
If you read us on a regular basis, you have to understand that we are a bunch of guys in Chicago who live in Boystown and are never going to suddenly wake up one morning and like women. We like guys. We know women who like other women. Those women won’t ever like men. We also know some people who like both men and women. That’s just how everyone’s wired. We don’t presume to know why that is. Frankly, there aren’t enough hours in a day for us to care. We’re too busy trying to stay afloat financially while doing everything we damn well can every day to assure Dr. Utopia gets only one term and either Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin becomes the first female president.
So, hating on gays is stupid.
Counterproductive.
So early 90s.
You might as well still be wearing Members Only jackets.
If 55% of Americans are no longer bigots like Sam Nunn (who believe submarine shower rooms are soapy lovefests directed by Chi Chi La Rue) and have no problem with gay men and lesbians defending our nation openly (because, wake up, they ARE in the military already…they just have to worry about being tossed out every day, at MASSIVE taxpayer expense), then the tide has turned.
There is no going back.
Gay marriage will happen, too. Nationally. And, yes, the first few months or year of it will indeed be obnoxious….since ain’t NOBODY who can be more outrageously obnoxious than the like of all of us in Boystown, the Castro, Lakewood, the Village, Peoria, you name it. A lot of conservatives probably dread the spectacle of those early days, but look at the nonsense we’ve survived the last year. Dr. Utopia’s campaign, election, and inauguration was the most obnoxious thing we could have ever imagined. The Race Industry capitalized on it like nothing before…and was more in your face and flamboyant in its displays for “the historic first black president” than we even thought was possible. But, Obamania is receding. By this time next year, it will be hard to remember just how bad it really was…and how irritating the MSM’s force feeding of the Kool-Aid seemed.
It will be the same for all of you who dread drag queens getting married in hot pink gowns or hordes of Harley-mounted lesbians roaring into town and descending upon your City Halls. There will be an obnoxious, rainbow-coated release of decades of pent up frustration, with guys marrying left and right and lesbians pushing and shoving to be first, first, FIRST! everywhere.
To be totally honest, at least one of us would get on a plane and head down to Philly and marry one of his exes if he could. The first day he’d have the chance, just so he could do it…and be a part of this…and have that life experience denied him for so long.
And then there would be a sudden drop in the excitement as reality set in that WE WON. No one would know what to do with themselves. There would suddenly be all sorts of free time for all those who made it their life’s mission to elect a black man president achieve marriage equality. Then, there would be a whole LOT of divorces…and an eventually (10-15 years or so in the future) settling down into a pattern pretty much on par with heterosexual marriages.
Some people would do it, others wouldn’t. Children would be born and would grow up in a world where gay marriage was always legal, so it would be a nonissue.
The MSM would need to find another wedge to drive in the Culture Wars to boost their ratings…and the likes of Fred Phelps will have to find a new raison d’etre (possibly raisins themselves, since they are so wrinkly…and GOD HATES RAISINS). The MSM will probably still be driving abortion as a cultural wedge, because unfortunately that’s so effective, even if it’s been legally decided for 35 years now.
But, it is only a matter of time before supposedly blue states like Illinois wake up and join the likes of Iowa — IOWA — and see that gay dudes in particular will blow tens of thousands of economy-stimulating dollars on flowers, bands, hotels, and at Tiffany’s should they be allowed to throw giant parties with rings like straight people (who don’t have the same disposable incomes, but who get to do all of this and then get divorced whenever they want, sanctity of marriage or whatever be damned).
All of this would happen sooner if we could find another word for it besides “gay marriage”, which is what’s still setting the religious people off. ”Civil Unions” is semantics that sets the LGBTQ community off. If we could only just rename “marriage” as “cromulence for all”, we’d have a done deal, folks.
But that deal will get here eventually, no matter what you want to call it.
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This is hilarious, but Alex Rodriguez really is all kinds of affectionate with Dereck Jeter.
It’s like Congressman Aaron Schock at MiniBar up in that Yankees dugout.
We have only the vaguest concept of who A-Rod and Jeter are…we know they are baseball players, and pretty good ones at that. They make millions of dollars by hitting things with sticks. Nice work if you can get it.
Guys in tight pants sure get handsy with one another.
That’s kinda MiniBar too.
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Someone sent us this today and we just had to share:
Chicago 2016 -- what happened to all that Green Olympics recycling crapola?
Congrats again to Rio!
Now you can have a giant mess, and we can have a clean non-messed up, non-bankrupt (whoops) city for the next 7 years!
It might actually be a fun costume to do something with the Chicago 2016 stuff for Halloween. How do you make an Olympics that will never happen into a costume? How do you express politically the angst felt by so many that all that money was wasted on this fool’s quest…and express that in a costume?
Could be a good Chicago challenge.
Chicago Halloween 2009
We like to augment our political coverage with highlights of our lives here in Chicago, as many of you out there always seem interested in learning more about the city from locals. So, in that spirit, here’s what’s going on in Chicago for Halloween 2009 — our favorite holiday. We’ve been asking everyone we see around town what they are wearing for costumes, and below you’ll find a running list of everything people tell us, as well as all the Halloween activities we hear about. Please help make this as comprehensive a list as possible by including ideas of your own: for costumes and for things to do around town. If you aren’t in Chicago, please feel free to add your two cents too, because maybe what’s going on in your town can inspire us here to do something similar either this year or in the future. This post will be archived as part of the “Our Chicago” feature on this site, so in the future if you ever need costumes ideas or want to know what Halloween in the Second City is like, it can be a resource for you. The ultimate goal there is to create a HillBuzz Guide to Chicago in the future, so you can come to town and visit all the things we like to talk about every day…and maybe even run into one of us, too, if we happen to be headed out for some pumpkin ravioli at Nookie’s or Cereal Killer pancake flights at Orange at the same time.
Consider this post a running work in progress through Halloween itself, with as much info and goodies as we can give you.
